


love, poppy

by ishka



Category: Free!
Genre: Animal Death, Drama, Getting Back Together, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:56:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22306795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishka/pseuds/ishka
Summary: Sousuke's cat dies. She was Makoto's, too.
Relationships: Tachibana Makoto/Yamazaki Sousuke
Comments: 22
Kudos: 88





	love, poppy

**Author's Note:**

> there's a lot i could say about this and won't. but the only thing i feel required to say is that i originally got this idea from a movie called mr. roosevelt but i took so long to write any of it i totally forgot what happens in the film and made the rest up so it's really just a nod to the original premise. thank.

_You have no new voice messages. You have sixteen saved voice messages._

_To play your first saved message, press one—_

_First saved voice message_

_sent_

_Wednesday_

_at_

_11:09 a.m._

_From telephone number_

_8 5 7 7 2 1 1 1 4_

_Duration_

_forty-four seconds_

_…_

_…_

_Hey. It’s me. Obviously. Didn’t want to text. Listen… and wait. Before you get upset with me, it was sudden, all right? I didn’t hide it or anything like that. But. It’s Poppy. She uh… ahfuckholdon— (no, the- no the visa works, thanks. yes the one on file. yeah. okay.)—Sorry. Poppy. She’s gone. I mean. She died, I don’t know why, she just did. And I just thought you’d want to know. All right. Yeah. Well I’m going to—_

_Message deleted._

_Next saved message—_

First of all.

The presumption. _It’s me,_ he says. _Obviously,_ he says. Of course, who else, because _it’s me_ is the _he_ by name in Makoto’s phone. _Obviously, Makoto, you still have my number, and I don’t actually need to identify myself._

Well. Maybe so.

Or.

 _It’s me,_ he says. _Obviously,_ he says. _Because even if you didn’t keep my number, you will always know my voice at any pitch, any distance, any place in time. The good news and the bad news and the certain nonverbal discomfort of my pauses because I hate, hate, hate catching myself using filler ums and uhhhs._

More likely.

Second of all.

The preemptive defensiveness. Not so much the implication that, were there evidence of a delay, Makoto would accuse Sousuke of withholding the information on purpose to spare Makoto’s feelings. No, think one level deeper. It is the implication that Makoto is paranoid enough to think Sousuke would ever do that in the first place because, of course, secretly, with no evidence, Sousuke has _always_ believed Makoto is too sensitive and fragile to handle the world, and—

Well. Okay. Fine. That might have some factual precedent.

Makoto sighs away the sinking pit in his stomach left behind by the deletion of the message. It was too much. He had listened to that first part way too much. He stares out the window of his cab into the foggy downpour on the other side. His forlorn sighing fogs the glass and reveals a crude pictograph drawn onto the surface by an anonymous prior occupant, absolutely ruining his cinematic personal moment. It is not unlike the messages of adoration the morning shower partner draws onto the mirrors of steam-saturated bathrooms for their night shower partner to find later, but it is strinkingly more pornographic.

As the passing scenery grows more intimately familiar, so too grows Makoto’s knee-jerk regret over this whole idea. This feeling would’ve been useful seven hours ago, in his apartment, as he packed his things for the flight. It is useless now.

Makoto had expected his return to Iwatobi to fit like a shoe he’d grown out of. He could wear it for a short time, but eventually he would need to get it off his foot. Instead it fits as if it is too big. With one misstep he could walk out of it and trip, and the energy that goes into stubbornly keeping it on as he walks surely outweighs the energy it takes to simply admit that he bought it without trying it on, because this style used to fit but it changed, and it’s his fault that he assumed it would be the same. Or something. It’s one convoluted way of saying he probably should’ve let someone know he was coming because he did not plan far enough ahead for the very likely scenario wherein Sousuke tells him to go fuck himself. Sousuke’s choice of words, of course. Makoto would never say that, oh no, not him, god forbid.

He is then robbed again of a cinematic personal moment. His plan to ask advice of the cab driver for a friend-of-a-friend is supplanted by the individual behind them’s plan to disregard the complicated rules of safe following distances in adverse weather conditions and rear-end the cab at a stop light. Makoto is already too tall and leaning forward as a consequence, and the force knocks his forehead into the plexiglass divider hard enough to look ridiculous and exaggerated, but flimsy enough it does no real damage to anything but his anemic pride.

The cab driver is justifiably pressed and has already all but leaped from the cab to give the offender an ear-full. Makoto sees his fare has already passed the cost of a dinner he now cannot afford on the shoestring budget he hacked together for this, and thinks the accident was probably for the best. He grabs his duffel bag on the seat next to him and exits the cab, rounds the front, and reaches into the driver side to both end the ride for himself and hit the hazard button for the driver. For his safety in these inclement times. The driver is too busy arguing with the man who hit them to care about this dimension-crossing norm buster. That was probably illegal.

Makoto finds his wallet, leaves cash on the seat, and sets off on his own to walk the rest of the way. Like most days for some reason or another, he has chosen a poor day to wear his glasses. The rain falls in sheets and it’s so cold his fingertips are blue and his clothes are soaked through within minutes, but this universal image of human suffering does finally make for the cinematic personal moment he feels he has earned. All that is missing is a car driving up on him too close to the flooded gutter, and for that Makoto is thankful to avoid after one too many stories about flesh-eating bacteria and where to find them (gutters).

It is a longer distance to his destination than Makoto calculated in his head while traveling at car-speeds. While he is pleased to see the storefronts of his youth still hanging in there, he is less pleased that it takes so long for the storefronts to end and the apartment buildings to begin. Every person with an umbrella both pities him and seems to be traveling in the opposite direction.

Just as he arrives at the apex of his internal whining about the whole affair, he concurrently arrives on the doorstep of his destination. And turns around. He walks back down the landing and a whole third of the way down the stairs before coming back to his senses. Or being driven from them again. Depends on the perspective. At the very least, the landing is covered, and getting out of the icy rain is better for his health in the long term. It’s getting dark anyway.

Back on the shoe mat. It has been replaced. Its predecessor used to say _welcome_. This one says a neutral nothing. The door looms impossibly tall and dark before him. He raises a hand to knock. He curses that word out loud he never says, oh no, not him, god forbid. He sets the hand back at his side. He turns around as he digs into his wet duffel bag for a smaller, less wet bag. From it he retrieves what he swore up and down he would reserve for the end of this trip. A one-time thing he knew he would need by then. But he needs it now.

Summoning the ancient lighter back to life in these conditions must count as an official act of necromancy. It takes an unreasonable number of flicks and concentrated prayer, but spark and ignite it finally does. He hesitates before bringing the flame to the tip of the cigarette held firm between his lips. It was a college thing. He quit a long time ago. He can’t afford it. He doesn’t even enjoy it. None of these arguments land, not today. He lights up and takes a long drag.

_Whoosh_

Makoto leans his forearms on the railing overlooking the street below and closes his eyes as he exhales and audibly sighs. He rocks back and forth on his heels, sinking into the rush, a cold little crab burying itself in hot sand. His nerves settle, his mobius thought spirals slow and break apart into harmless, half-formed vagueries. It’s fleeting, but the reprieve is priceless. Apparently, half the joy in having quit derives from the echoes of that first-time rush returning when the quitter, statistically speaking, picks it up again in a moment of weakness.

After Makoto smokes it down, then he will knock. He has enough working against him just being here. He needs to be as collected as possible going in, because what awaits him on the other side of that threshold will surely make an ass of him one way or another. No, in comparison to that, maybe these last few anxious, miserable hours have been quite peaceful.

“I thought you quit.”

Makoto jumps a foot in the air and slams the cigarette into the rail, snuffing it out. He simultaneously exhales and coughs the rest of the evidence through the corner of his mouth as he shakes his head and turns towards the disturbance, eyes watering. “I did! I—” cough, cough “— _did_. It was just. To relax. I only brought one, see?” He flashes the empty small pouch he brought out, as if Sousuke will immediately understand its sole purpose was to hold it and the lighter. Stupid.

Sousuke sighs and shifts a bag of groceries from one arm to the other to fish his keys out of his pocket. All that anguish about knocking and he wasn’t home. If he’s shocked to see Makoto, he hides it well. If he’s happy to see Makoto, he hides that even better. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted— I thought— You didn’t—” Sousuke’s eyes narrow ever so slightly. Wrong direction. “Poppy,” he manages.

Mild exasperation. “I don’t actually have her. I brought her to the vet.”

“I know. I meant— wait. Like just, carried her in?”

“Yeah. In a box.”

“A _box_? What kind of box?”

“Toaster oven. Just got a new one.”

Makoto nods and dares to picture it and the pit in his stomach returns. He swallows a lump in his throat. “...It’s what she would’ve wanted.”

Sousuke has not made a move to go inside, in fact he stands at the same distance he stopped at. He looks Makoto up and down and not in a good way. “Why are you soaked?”

“Oh. That. Someone hit the cab I was in and I decided to walk—”

“Jesus,” Sousuke curses. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. It just seemed silly to wait for another when I was already so close, and to be honest I miss the coastline rains anyway—”

“Makoto.”

“Yes.” He nearly winces. Too chipper. Sousuke knows that high tone for what it is.

“Why are you here?”

“To get Poppy.”

“I told you I would get her to you when I got her back. Did you even listen to the whole message?”

Makoto clears his throat. The air between them is quickly thickening. “Yes, I just thought I should be here to get her myself. It felt wrong to have my dead cat’s ashes overnighted to me.”

Approximately one million arguments briefly turn Sousuke into the man with a thousand angry faces. In the end, he settles back on passivity. “Okay. Fine. But why are you _here_?”

Oh. By now Makoto figured he would’ve come up with a good answer to this inevitable question. A good answer to this question and the truth are mutually exclusive for the time being. The truth, however, requires he get his foot in the door, literally and figuratively. It would not go over well to lead with _I know I’m not allowed to but I think I miss you can I be in close quarters with you while I figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do with that._

Apparently he takes too long to answer, and Sousuke decides he doesn’t want to know. “Forget it. Are you staying here?”

“I was hoping I could.”

Makoto would be lying if he weren’t relieved to see Sousuke’s stoney, cold caution thaw out just a little. Makoto deserves every bit of his wariness and anger. He would not contest it if Sousuke told him to leave or screamed at him or laughed in his face. Best case scenario, Makoto hoped Sousuke would let him stay for a night before suggesting he go elsewhere.

Sousuke finally moves for his door. “Yeah. Of course.”

Any sort of levity and seriousness such a reunion might warrant is immediately drowned out by the squish-squelch of Makoto’s water-logged shoes as he follows Sousuke into the apartment. He stops to get his feet free of that and the socks, which takes some effort given the near-hermetic seal fabric and water and skin create, and also loses his button down for good measure but not before using it to towel off his dripping hair. Maybe the coat hook isn’t the best place to hang it, but it is the only option for now. The duffel bag he sets on the shoe bench, wasted cigarette stuffed back into the pouch it came from. When he steps from the tile entry into the home proper, Sousuke has already found him a towel, and offers it at arm’s length. Makoto mutters a thanks and clears his glasses first, his exposed skin next, and his undershirt and pants last. He will still need a shower and a change into dry clothes imminently, but until he gets his bearings this is fine.

The apartment is in the same basic arrangement as Makoto left it, barring a few pieces replaced or removed to Sousuke’s tastes. He got a bigger TV. The old orange throw blanket Sousuke despised but Makoto loved is nowhere to be found. Poppy’s cat condo is where it has always been. Makoto does not look directly at it.

“I tried to re-arrange but there isn’t a lot of space to work with,” Sousuke says from the kitchen, reading Makoto’s mind. “Just ended up being unintuitive, so I moved it all back.”

“I tried to warn you the feng shui just wouldn’t be right any other way,” Makoto jests.

“Yeah, well, can’t blame me for trying,” he says from around the corner. Ceramic _clinks_ from the kitchen. The gas stove burner sparks and ignites, _clickclickclick-whumf._ The faucet runs water for five and a half seconds. Sousuke puts the kettle on and Makoto wrestles with unearned disappointment. Tea is for guests. A far cry from the pot of coffee he used to come home to.

When Makoto catches up with him, Sousuke is leaning back on the countertop facing out into the living room. Makoto would dare say he is positioned to deliberately place the half-wall separating the two areas between them. He walks up to the half-wall and takes a seat at one of the stools. His usual seat, maybe Sousuke recalls. On the left, where he would sit and watch Sousuke cook, a safe distance away from being a kitchen hazard, and close enough to hear him talking to himself.

Something about Makoto’s choice to sit there wires Sousuke’s jaw shut tight. The muscles bunch and stay that way, making it incumbent on Makoto to pull them both out of a memory lest they sit in awkward silence until it’s too late to fix it. There’s a Poppy-shaped elephant in the room, but maybe it’s better to start from a few steps back. “How have you been?”

Sousuke folds his arms across his chest and shrugs one shoulder. “Pretty good, actually. Kenji retired. Got my transfer.”

Makoto gasps. “I was convinced he would die at his desk. Congratulations, Sousuke, really. That’s great. What do you work on now?”

“Fraud, mostly. Embezzlement. Entry level, nothing serious.”

“It’s close to what you wanted?”

“It’s on the right track.”

It could never be exactly what he wanted, he always told Makoto, which frustrated Makoto at the time as it was anathema to everything he understood Sousuke to be for many years. In hindsight, Sousuke simply understood something Makoto did not, something that is only experienced at the various breaking points of life’s intersections. Of which, Sousuke has racked up quite a few in his relatively short time, more than Makoto anyway. Makoto only now understands the difference between growing into something and trying to force something to grow around him. That strength is dead weight without flexibility, and that flexibility is brittle without strength.

“I’m very happy for you,” Makoto says, and hopes Sousuke feels how much he means it.

Sousuke does smile, just enough, but perhaps noticing how easily they fall back into old patterns, he quickly reels it in and drops it for neutrality once more. “What about you?”

Makoto looks down at his folded hands. If his answer is anything less than _amazing_ then there’s a possibility Sousuke hears Makoto ruined their lives for nothing. But it isn’t amazing, and Makoto did ruin it, and there’s not even a Poppy to keep him company if he says that and Sousuke storms out.

He looks back up at Sousuke who has kept a cool and metered gaze trained on him since he asked. It hasn’t hit Makoto until now that the idea Sousuke simply does not care one way or the other, and is only making small talk, is more devastating than if whatever Makoto says makes him angry. “I’ve learned a lot,” he chooses to say and not say. With a smile and not a smile. He does not want to know just now if Sousuke doesn’t care, not yet.

“I bet,” Sousuke replies. And that’s that. A weighty silence settles in a beat too long to be natural. “You look miserable. Why don’t you go get a shower? I’ll finish this.”

Makoto nods meek acquiescence to this not-really-a-suggestion. He retrieves his duffel bag and follows his muscle memory from the living space to the washroom. Absent is any indication Sousuke is thinking about him or watching him move at all as he floats as a ghost through his former home. Not even worth a mild suspicion. A non-threat to Sousuke’s new equilibrium; Sousuke is not living in the past. Perhaps unlike Makoto, who now catches himself in a particular ritual, standing in the doorway looking down near his feet for a mischievous cat.

* * *

It is not that Makoto didn’t want to see anyone else. He’s been gone a while after all, and has dodged efforts to reconnect with excuses. It’s just that, for this trip, he has his hands full showing up on Sousuke’s doorstep with a duffel bag full of a maelstrom of emotions threatening to burst through the zipper and more people dropping in to help the zipper along certainly constitutes as the bad timeline divergence.

Sousuke neglects to mention that Rin was already on his way over. Judging by Sousuke’s uninspired apology for this oversight, it was a development intentionally withheld. It’s a stunningly lethal referendum on Makoto’s dropping in unannounced, as it places Makoto’s amazing life where he has learned _so_ much, apparently, on trial for everyone who’s just been dying to hear about it. Makoto is reminded that despite his erroneous best efforts to be forgotten by him, Sousuke knows Makoto and has inexplicably always known him and can still use this knowledge to remind Makoto he’s not as slick as he thinks he is here.

All that being said and suffered, Rin’s livewired ecstatic reception to running into a freshly showered Makoto was genuine enough to get Makoto forget his budget and agree easily to a late dinner out. That and being so hungry that every time he turned around or stood up too fast his blood pressure doth protest. But the idea of food fell quickly secondary to meeting Haru there, another surprise that truly softened the edges of his grief, and despite the atmosphere hanging over this visit, some bonds are stronger than their trials. It is why all four can sit shoulder to shoulder around a circular high top with little dead space between the shared laughs and old stories.

Yet all old stories eventually tell their way forward to the present.

“To Poppy,” Rin toasts, holding up his drink. “The only cat who ever loved me.”

Sousuke nods. “Craziest shit I ever saw.”

“It’s because she knew I was a good person, Sousuke.”

Haru, who famously bides his time for the best impact with the fewest words and has not said much until this point, takes fries from Rin’s side of the appetizer platter and adds: “Not every good person is likeable. Goodness is a moral condition, likeability is fluid.”

“Oh, fuck off, Haru.” It serves as a rebuke of both Haru’s pedantic philosophizing and his food theft. He rips the fries from Haru’s grasp, breaking them all in half when Haru frowns and doesn’t let go, and eats the mush he gets back anyway. “The day Makoto brought home that crotchety ass cat (may she rest in peace) she immediately—”

“Pissed on your shoes,” Sousuke levels.

“—slept on my lap first. Before any of you. We were thick as fuckin’ thieves from. Day. One.” He pontificates the last words of his statement, jabbing a fingertip into the tabletop as he speaks. “Know why? She knew bullshit when she sniffed it. I asked her everything and she just had this way of telling me the truth. Like a fluffy, pissy magic eight ball.”

Sousuke sighs. “Do not tell me you shook my cat for answers, Rin.”

Rin does not address it, Poppy has taken the truth to her grave. “My point is, look—” He regards Sousuke, briefly looking to Makoto and back again. “I’m sorry. She was a good old bag. She helped me out of too many existential crises to count. Like… okay. Look—”

“You keep saying that and we are all looking.”

“Ahem! She was your sous chef, Sousuke, and really had an opinion about a rutabaga, which in particular is that they suck and taste like a radish if a radish had no flavor. Haru, she picked out paint colors for whatever dumb thing you were working on in Sousuke’s living room. Makoto…. well she yelled at you a lot and attacked your ankles and who among us present can claim to be as impervious to your charm as Poppy was?”

“She didn’t like me very much,” Makoto confirms with some strain.

“Not at _all_ ,” Rin laughs. “No offense but man it was good to be the one the cat liked, for once.”

Makoto’s smile in response is weak and watery. He hopes it is dim enough in the restaurant to pass as genuine. Rin’s just trying to keep the environment light and fun and self-deprecating, after all, against all lurking signs it is anything but.

Sousuke doesn’t look at Makoto’s reaction but still leaves it alone, even if he didn’t have to. He is easily egged into teaming up with Rin for such pile-on antics so for this restraint, Makoto is grateful. Instead he rolls his eyes. “Thank you, Rin, for that moving eulogy.”

“Someone had to! You guys haven’t said anything about it!” He shrugs. “Gotta lean into that grief. Share those feelings. I swear you three are made of stone sometimes and adulthood has done nothing to temper this affliction.”

Haru looks around the table, lingering a side glance on Makoto that Makoto can physically feel. Of course Haru would clearly see that Rin’s choice of memorialization bothered Makoto, even if it was the truth that Poppy really just did not like him. “I think we saw in Poppy the kind of friend we all needed, is all. She didn’t dislike anyone. She swatted at you, Rin, just as often as I’d find her curled up near Makoto. She knocked over Sousuke’s seasonings. She walked through my paint.”

Rin glares at him, but relents with a mutter. “Maybe so. Anyway. She lived out her twilight years in luxury. We should celebrate that part, not be all silent and avoidant. That’s all I wanted to say.” He takes a quick break from his role as the social conduit to eat food before it’s gone totally cold, then aborts that idea when his phone chimes with a new message, officially making him the only man under forty years old who does not keep his phone on silent in perpetuity. “Oh shit,” he exclaims, looking to Haru and breaking into a grin. The funeral-esque atmosphere dissipates with Rin’s shift in energy. “Cancellation at the Overtime. Want to fill in tomorrow?”

“When?”

“Eight. One hour set.”

Haru shrugs. “Yeah, why not.”

Makoto takes a moment of silence to parse the meaning of the exchange until it hits him all at once. He had all but forgotten about Rin and Haru’s quarter-life, crisis-era, extremely short-lived garage band... Naval Battle? Something like that. “Oh wow! You guys still play?”

“Here and there,” Rin answers. “Just for fun.”

Somehow, they play quite well together, where Rin takes a keyboard and Haru takes a guitar and they employ a punky-rockish duet style just loose enough to encourage a little competition between them for the best runaway solos and yet contained enough within the limits of traditional songwriting structures to keep them from jumping the invisible line and killing each other. Those two will always just work in mysterious ways, Makoto concluded a long time ago. This music venture is probably still the most normal of the schemes they’ve gotten into since leaving college.

“They’re not bad,” Sousuke pipes in for no reason Makoto can discern other than as a way to encourage the subject change onward. “All those YouTube lessons paid off.”

“Which means you’re coming, right?”

“Plans,” he says. “Sorry.”

Rin rolls his eyes. “Oh, just bring your date.” He sits up suddenly and looks at Makoto as he course-corrects with a dismissive hand wave. “Or whatever it is. Cancel it.”

Sousuke doesn’t react either way. Makoto envisions placing all of his panic into a metal box and slamming down the top to seal it. “Nah. I’ll catch the next one.”

“Uuugh!” Rin groans, throwing his head back dramatically. “Fine.”

“I go literally every time. You’ll live.”

“Makoto,” Haru interrupts, and he sounds gentle like how creamer curls and swirls into coffee in contrast to Rin’s pot of water boiling against a loose metal lid. “How long are you in town? Would you like to come?”

Reflexively, he nearly declines. Then he thinks about staying at Sousuke’s the same night there is now a non-zero chance Sousuke brings someone home. “Oh, I leave Sunday, so I would be happy to. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you two play.”

“Yeah, like a year.” Then, Rin’s eyes go wide and he slaps the heel of his palm to his forehead. “Wait— duh! I didn’t even ask, Makoto! Why did you let me go on and on about fabric the whole way here?”

It is a glimmer of self-awareness worth only a mutually exhausted glance between Sousuke and Haru.

Makoto nearly smiles. “I like to hear how you’re doing.”

Rin sweeps his arms in front of himself to symbolically shove all that out of the way. “You almost had me, you almost got away with making me think you said something. I’m rusty on your tactics. Saving the oceans! How’s it going?”

There’s likely a reason neither Sousuke nor Haru were the first to bring it up, despite it being a gaping, painfully obvious gap in everyone’s knowledge up to this point. Whether they sense the failure and self-contempt radiating off of Makoto’s every breath or they’ve known his noble declaration to move and join up with a cause “bigger than himself” for the desperate ploy to run away that it really was, they have never needled him for the details, as such false pretenses render the resulting consequences illegitimate. Rin by his own admission does not follow such convoluted constructs of social etiquette, and would rather rip all of Makoto’s bandaids off at once, apparently, as a converted devotee to the belief that wounds are better off aired out.

Worse, Rin isn’t stupid, and does this deliberately in front of Sousuke and Haru and only pretends it didn’t occur to him to ask until now. Makoto understands Rin’s silence on the matter was never Rin’s implicit blessing over how Makoto handled things. Rather the opposite. Makoto only thought he could outrun his friends’ disappointment with the dulling effects of time, but once again he has underestimated the staying power of Rin’s grudges. In any case, Makoto breaking his silence is the one true debt he won’t get away without making a good faith payment on, if he truly intends contrition.

“It’s… humbling. Very humbling.”

Rin nods along. “Yeah, yeah, humbling, what is it you help out with again? Marketing?”

“Oh, sort of, mostly administrative—”

“So like, collecting donations?”

“No—”

“Y’know, with that face, you gotta be the guy at the fundraisers sweet talkin’ Tokyo’s elite for cash. Defendin’ the oceans and the critters— oh! Like Aquaman, right? Except your power is convincing CEOs to hold off on another round of stock buy-backs and lean into philanthropy instead?”

Flustered, Makoto stumbles over a handful of half-formed syllables. “I— no, not exactly.”

“Really?” Rin props his chin on his palm and grins behind curled fingers. “Then what do you do out there?”

“I said administrative work, mostly. Nothing—”

“Like?”

“Rin,” Haru mumbles in warning, confirming Makoto’s nagging feeling that he’s walking into something.

“What? I’m just asking.”

“Like paperwork,” Makoto answers quickly. It’s dry. He clears his throat. “Phones. Scheduling meetings.”

“Nah,” Rin laughs. “No, that’s not it. What is it, really?”

Makoto frowns. Haru shoots Rin an even stronger look, but Makoto sees his resolve is paper thin, revealing begrudged deference. Sousuke has taken interest in a spot on the wall behind Haru’s shoulder. Rin is clear to carry out his plan without protest, as long as he keeps it amicable.

“Really. Th-that’s it. Uh… support. Behind the scenes.” He smiles and slips into something more intentionally self-depreciative. “Well. During grant deadline weeks, I’m the coffee guy for the whole floor, if you can believe it, even though they all have seen how clumsy I am.”

Rin laughs along with it for a moment, but it doesn’t sustain. “In your spare time, between what? Pressuring the government for more sustainability-focused fishing regulations? Traveling abroad to conservation conventions? C’mon, Makoto, don’t be shy about it.”

“Rin,” Makoto says, somewhat firm and weary of this game already. “I’m not lying.”

“No, you’re just being humble. Making a huge difference and don’t want to make a scene out of it, I get it.”

The table rattles. Makoto belatedly registers it rattled because he dropped his hands onto it in frustration. Oh, no. He flexes his fingers and hastily drops his hands to rest on his lap. “Rin, I— I don’t know how else to say it. I work in administration. Office maintenance, really. I don’t know what else you want me to say but that truly is the job.”

The plain admission seems to meet some arbitrary checkpoint. Haru no longer tries to silence Rin with a half-hearted glare and has taken to nursing his drink as the conversation unfolds. Sousuke’s barely flinched; the only indication he’s listening at all is in the barely visible soured bend to the curve of his mouth.

“Oh,” Rin says. He sits back off his palm and plucks a fry off the plate. Chews it slow, takes his time. “You on a promotion path?”

Makoto’s ears are fully red and hot now. “No, not exactly.”

“So you moved to Tokyo for… an office support job?”

“Well, sort of—”

“No, not sort of. Yes or no?”

The heat crawls over his cheeks. Haru has gone the way of Sousuke, staring statuesque at nothing in the mid-distance. Makoto is simultaneously the largest and smallest person in the establishment, shoved into a corner and without a viable exit. He sighs quietly. “Yes, okay?”

“Ah. Okay. I get it. I just really wanted to make sure, y’know?” Rin narrows his eyes and his next words are marbly and threaten to break casual conversation’s surface tension, which would surely draw attention from other patrons. “Because it sounds like you’re saying that you gave all this up, fucked off, cut us all out without saying _fuck_ all—”

“Rin,” Haru warns again, but there’s no bite to it and his eyes remain averted.

“—so you could go and make peanuts running coffee and making copies for the people who make the difference that you said you were going to make.” A long hum. “Did I get it right?”

Makoto looks around the table for a lifeline. Futile. He sits up straighter and squares his shoulders. His chest, however, threatens to collapse in. “Yes, Rin.”

“Well. Isn’t that indeed humbling.” He pauses and looks Makoto up and down. “Are you happy, at least?”

“Rin. Please.”

And now Rin finally looks at Sousuke when he needles Makoto again: “Was it worth it?”

The heat on Makoto’s face is nearly unbearable. Shame gives way to righteous, defensive anger, a shift that vents some of the pressure building behind his eyes. “It’s a work in progress,” he argues back. “Was I supposed to show up and immediately demand to be CEO?”

“You were supposed to have something to show for this bullshit, something that was self-evident you did it for the reasons you claimed to be doing it for. The reasons that we all knew you were lying about.”

“Well I don’t.” And, because feeding this defiant monster feels incredibly good and powerful after starving it so long with bottomless remorse: “Satisfied? Or did you want to rake me over the coals a little longer while you have your passively captivated audience?”

Not expecting Makoto to bite back, and finding the audacity of it as repugnant as he should, Rin sneers in a way that he would never have done towards Makoto in the past. All teeth and resentment. It ices Makoto’s fury just as quickly as it flared. “You’re not here for the fuckin’ cat. You’re here for you.”

“I’m sorry,” he submits. “But it’s more complicated than that.”

“Right, sure. You want to do the right thing and make a move to fix some of this? Fine. But if you think you’re going to show up here—”

Sousuke’s gargoyle figure suddenly re-mortalizes beneath the blinding light of Rin’s righteous tirade to speak sharply. “Rin.”

Rin ignores him. “—and act the way you did before, to get things back to the way they were before, and not give a fuck about how you broke our hearts, and hey, fuck it, let’s not dance around what I mean here—” Rin points where he should not and the oxygenated air between them all goes up in flames. “— _his_ heart—”

The splintering interruption comes as a cannonball into the side of a ship. “Shut up, Rin,” Sousuke says, rounding on him and batting his hand down and away from his face.

“Again, none of you are gonna say it, all of you fuckin’ ignore it, so I am and I won’t!”

Haru looks around the restaurant, a swelling self-consciousness inversely sized to his hissing whisper. “Guys.”

“I didn’t ask you to say _anything_!”

All his fault. This is all because of him, and his delusional coming back, and particularly because of his cowardly leaving. Maybe they argue longer and devolve into a fist fight, or maybe against the odds they get into it more constructively after that, but Makoto is not there to find out because he is walking away now, well his body is, but his mind is already outside and gasping for air two minutes ago. One whole thought propels him, _get out get out get out_ , and it stopped raining some time back, but now it’s pitch black and foggy and freezing and each step kicks up icy droplets until the bottom of his jeans are soaked, again, and his feet are numb in his still damp shoes, again, because he only thought to bring one stupid, ugly pair.

Makoto fades into the dark, and nothing is changed. So it goes.

* * *

Makoto’s parents moved away a few years ago to be closer to where the twins resettled, leaving his childhood home vacant an inordinate amount of time before it finally sold to a retired couple who keeps to themselves. At the time, he chose to stay in Iwatobi rather than go with the family. A forced experiment in cohabitation. But the vacant home came to serve as a bastion for detangling his more complicated moods in peace. Not inside, obviously, but a hop over the fence when no one was looking to sit in the small backyard never hurt anyone. With the retired couple there now, he can’t do that either, so the steps leading up to his former and Haru’s current homes will have to do. Everything changes as everything stays the same, maybe.

A suitable distance between now and the argument in the restaurant allows Makoto to make space for some objectivity amidst all the embarrassment. The open-faced airing of dirty laundry between the four of them is nothing new by now. There is an unspoken consensus, forged through many trials and experiences over the years, that it hurts to be vulnerable and accountable, but it doesn’t hurt as much as lies and secrets do in the long run. Sousuke and Makoto’s separation is an outlier in its cover up. It was bound to surface for exposure quicker than Makoto could return and quietly untangle it for himself first. In some ways, there is a weight off his shoulders now that polite social boundaries are out of the way. It will be easier to deal with things in plainer terms.

…If he chooses to stay and do so.

As he huddles in a ball on the steps to ward off the chill, he rocks his thumb pad back and forth on his phone screen to keep it lit as he considers the cost of changing his return flight to tomorrow morning. Ultimately he accepts he cannot pay that much and still afford his bills, which truly says more for the quality of his life choices until this point than any appeal to emotion can. Whatever he ran towards to get away from himself, he sure didn’t factor in the sustainability of the chase.

Makoto drops his forehead to his knees, held in place by his arms, and sighs into his center. He melts into his memories, too tired to stay focused on the present.

It was always these times of uncertainty that Sousuke excelled in. When Makoto was despaired and beyond hope, Sousuke wasn’t always sure how to move him. When Makoto was driven and inspired, Sousuke didn’t need to. But the times inbetween, the whirling maelstroms of indecision where Makoto sat paralyzed with doubt and ceaseless navel gazing and could hardly decide what to wear, much less how to move forward… this impossible place was where Sousuke found a way in.

And Makoto let him in, for a time. He would not only speak honestly, but he would let Sousuke listen to it. He would let Sousuke find him in ruin, know him stripped down, deeply ponder his petty problems. He would lay open and vulnerable, frankly terrified, while Sousuke gently teased answers from the impossible, patience eternal and compassion boundless and yet steadfastly realistic. It would work, bit by bit, never too much or too little at once, until Makoto could breathe again. Move again. He would accept he made things too complicated, proven in the way Sousuke laughed at how many knots Makoto had tied himself up in over something so silly, and then made those same complicated things simple. He would let Sousuke love him the way Sousuke wanted to. And for all this, it meant he could crawl out of his own head and love Sousuke the way Sousuke deserved. And they were happy.

Right?

Yes, of course. He takes a page from Sousuke’s book. It is simple. He knows it to be true or he wouldn’t be here nearly debilitated with the fear of confronting it.

Happy until, incrementally, Makoto turned his unwieldy despair on himself, and pushed Sousuke out so far to hide his shame that Sousuke couldn’t find a way back in. Then he called it rejection, and he ran away, and he told himself if he didn’t stick around to see how much it hurt Sousuke then he could never say for sure that it hurt Sousuke much at all, and in fact it was just as likely Sousuke was relieved to be rid of him. Schroedinger’s Sousuke, an irresistible logical cop out when the alternative was fighting for his happiness by doing the work and taking on the hard part (himself).

Makoto is not startled when his right side flushes with the warmth of another body settling next to him. He didn’t exactly try to hide, and Haru still lives here and would’ve had to come home eventually. Makoto unrolls from his awkward ball enough to lay the side of his head on his hugged knees and acknowledge Haru down-nose.

“You overpaid,” Haru says, nudging a folded thousand-yen bill to Makoto’s fingertips. This forces Makoto to sit up all the way, so he can stuff it down into a pocket to be re-added to his wallet later. No sense in pretending he doesn’t want it. “And I should’ve said something sooner. I’m sorry.”

Makoto shakes his head. “No, I think I earned that.”

“It’s just… you know Rin. He would’ve said it one way or another. He’s wanted to for a long time.”

“I’m not upset about it. I shouldn’t have left, but…” He trails off. But nothing. “But I did.”

“If you hadn’t, Sousuke would’ve. That territory isn’t Rin’s to settle. He knew better.”

Makoto hums ambivalently and Haru allows the residual tension from it all to dissipate in silence.

“What I said was true,” Makoto confirms. “All of it.”

“I know. I could tell.”

“I’m sorry for the way I handled things. Before and now.”

Haru speaks next with trepidation, exposing a fear he has ruminated on in the wake of Makoto’s silence. “Were you that unhappy here? With him? Us?” And Makoto understands by it that Haru can hardly bear the idea that he may have contributed to Makoto’s turmoil and never knew.

“No,” Makoto denies quickly. “I was very happy.” He looks out down the stairs. “But so were all of you.”

“Am I supposed to know what you mean?”

He’s had time to think about how to say all this, but it doesn’t make it any easier to do. If he weren’t so exhausted from travel and car accidents and walking and arguing in a diner, his hands might be shaking by now. Luckily, he is that exhausted, and it’s so cold he barely feels his hands anyway. “It was always easy to focus on you all. I mean, it was always something life-endingly dramatic for years on end every time I turned around.”

Haru snorts. “You weren’t immune.”

He smiles a little. “ _But_ things got better and then I didn’t have to focus on you anymore. And all the things I’d been making excuses to ignore while we all tried to figure our lives out I couldn’t ignore anymore. I wasn’t prepared for it. And I broke everything on my way out. Poppy was right not to like me.”

“She really didn’t,” Haru groans. “I was trying to make you feel better in the moment.”

“I appreciate it, but we all know the scars don’t lie.”

Another pause, then: “Are you coming back?”

“I don’t know,” Makoto says quietly. He nearly confesses his truer thoughts then, that the fact that they don’t need him anymore terrifies him.

Haru hears what he doesn’t say anyway. “We’ll always want you around. And I always figured you’d come back, actually, which is why I never let Rin convince me to find you and kick your door down.”

“I want to. But, I don’t know,” he repeats. He can’t quite bring himself to admit that, selfishly, a lot depends on Sousuke. Haru’s insistence of _we_ flutters at his heart a little bit, but he is not so naive as to bank a decision upon a single word. Being needed is a tangible and evidenced situation. Being wanted is an act of faith and belief.

But it is all explanation enough for Haru, who prefers to understand people in immaterial ways that don’t require him to pick them apart for details. He nods and the worry eases out of his features. “Well. My ass is cold now and these stairs are still wet. Are you staying with me?”

That would be the natural path, given the time and circumstances, but it may not be the right one in the long run. “Actually, I think I should go back,” Makoto answers. “If you don’t mind.” Because he would desperately appreciate a ride at this point.

Haru answers by standing and brushing himself off of potential dirt, then offering Makoto his hand. “He said he’d leave the door unlocked if that’s what you wanted to do.”

Makoto stares at Haru’s offered assistance, thoughts threatening to stutter into a jumble and coerce him into retreating all the way up the stairs onto one of Haru’s spare futons. Is he waiting up? But for what? Or just being hospitable? But somehow, perhaps too tired to think himself into oblivion, he shakes it off and takes the help. Maybe it’s the simplest option.

* * *

There’s a pillow and a familiar ugly orange blanket folded neatly next to it waiting for him on the couch when Makoto walks in.

It’s only a quarter after ten, but Sousuke must already be asleep. His shoes are in the entryway and his bedroom door is shut; no light leaks through the gaps. Makoto is relieved. He can barely keep his eyes open, and dozed off once or twice on the drive over. He is in a state for neither a performance nor a confrontation.

He takes his things to the bathroom to clean up and dress down, doing his best to ignore how utterly awkward it feels to play the modest guest in a place he lived for so long. On top of it, he’s reached that derealized state where too much has happened in so little time that he’s fallen temporarily out of alignment with his body, with the self jolted a few inches to the right, and the mind tethered like a dog on a leash being dragged across the floor behind him. Is there a difference between the self and the mind? There is tonight.

At first glance, the couch is the same. Upon sitting on it, Makoto immediately notices it is much firmer and stitched ever so slightly differently, with a double row of thread versus his memory-embedded single row. It is a newer version of the same black couch he had before, and the so-very-Sousuke nature of such a ridiculous thing makes him snort. Noticeably missing from the pristine cushions is the plague of white cat hair, and Makoto’s amusement is cut short. To be swiftly rid of reminders of what’s not coming back is also so-very-Sousuke.

Makoto’s orange blanket smells like it’s been folded at the bottom of the linen closet for exactly one year; a stale melange of detergents and dust. But the weight, the feel, even the sound of it is as it always was. Getting comfortable on the couch is the least painful thing he’s endured all day. He’s regretted not taking the blanket with him, because something about it

makes sleep

seem so

easy—

_Makoto_

—five seconds or five minutes or five hours later

the gentlest whisper.

He doesn’t open his eyes, in case it isn’t real and doing so will shatter the illusion, as if the touch and the scent and the sound of Sousuke here, sitting beside him, is not proof enough. But he does bring his hand up to rest over Sousuke’s. He lifts Sousuke’s hand from the side of his face and holds it down to his chest. He curls himself up around it and sighs unevenly through his jagged lungs.

“I’m sorry,” he can barely say, “I’m so sorry, Sousuke.”

Sousuke bends forward where he sits on the very edge of the couch and kisses Makoto’s temple. Makoto squeezes his hand tighter while he bites back a dry, unbidden sob. He does not know the last time anyone really touched him since Sousuke and he cannot count how many times he’s dreamed it was Sousuke again who finally did.

“Look at me, Makoto.”

He still does not want to, residual doubt pooling at the back of his skull. But slowly it evaporates, the warmer Sousuke’s hand becomes, and Makoto unfurls from his half-ball and opens his eyes. Sousuke’s features are dim in the newly dark apartment. The warm, low-lit lamp Makoto dozed off with is now off. But the intensity of every line, the beauty, is unmistakably him. He is closer than Makoto thought he could earn in such a short window of time, even by his best projection. The impossibility of it flares his anxiety.

“Why?” Makoto asks, inexplicably. Why what? Why is he here? Why is he touching him? Why is he looking at him like that? Why isn’t he furious? “Sousuke, we should talk.”

Sousuke doesn’t agree. He shakes his head as he dips forward again and he kisses Makoto proper this time, swept up in urgency. When Makoto returns from wherever that sent him to, Sousuke is straddling him, grasping him by his shirt, deepening his kiss; escalation Sousuke would only be pushing so quickly if Makoto were responding and encouraging him. He finds he is, with enthusiasm, as if minutes have passed already and not mere seconds. His hands are secure around Sousuke’s hips, having travelled a long way in no time from their place pressed close to his chest. The orange blanket tucked around him moments ago is in a heap on the floor. Sousuke then goes for his throat, slow, while he holds Makoto’s hands above his head, pressed to the armrest, and allows no pause for Makoto to figure out how they got there from his hips. Makoto dips in and out of coherency, succumbed and overwhelmed. He says “we should talk” and hears it leave his mouth as something rough, hungry, and unrestrained. And just as he has wholly given in and accepted his body possesses a different agenda from his rational mind—

Makoto is laying on his side, and Sousuke’s pressed behind him and holding onto him tightly, as they barely fit on the couch and Makoto would fall if he weren’t secured. He is wrapped in his blanket and still he is cold; only Sousuke’s fingers brushing through his hair, only Sousuke’s sigh on the back of his neck, give any warmth at all.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” Sousuke asks, quiet and heavy with sorrow.

Makoto is still in the confusing ecstasy of a moment ago, still frustrated that he can’t get Sousuke to listen while he simultaneously asked Sousuke for more. “I did— I just tried to.”

Sousuke pulls him closer, somehow, totally flush and wrapped around Makoto and his pleas echo through Makoto’s answer. Like Makoto never said anything, as if he is asleep and Sousuke knows it to be the only time he can get this close, and beg so fully, for Makoto’s attention and affection. “Please don’t do this.”

Here, here

I’m right here

Why can’t you hear me

And why is the couch single stitched?

Makoto comes to, and he knows he has for certain, because the lamp is still on and the blanket hasn’t shifted and the cold stones of regret in his gut are still there, churning and eroding him into dust.

His nerves are shot and frayed, distrustful of this reality after being so sure of the former. He reaches for the glass of water on the coffee table and sits up halfway to down it. It is only after he sets it back down and re-situates to attempt to sleep once more that he remembers he never got himself water, and he has neither proof nor explanation for the ghost of sensation, the suggestion of touch, lingering at his hairline. A soft light spills through from the bedroom. It will be hours before he sleeps again.

* * *

With age comes new and exciting ways to experience a hangover. Alcohol’s simplistic yet devastating reign often wanes to the demands of growing up and is supplanted by more sinister, common aggressors. Refined carbohydrates, salt, and uncomfortable confrontations also produce deleterious effects to Makoto’s constitution when experienced in excessive quantities. With trashy food ruled out as an instigator, given he’s barely had anything to eat, he assumes he wakes up feeling puffy yet hollow due to the unmitigated stress of the day prior.

Sousuke has been up and in the kitchen making breakfast for a while. Loud enough that there is no way he thinks Makoto could still be sleeping, but Makoto is not sure where he fits into this ritual, if at all, and has chosen to lay there without saying or doing anything in response. In hindsight it is the more awkward approach. The good news being that no one has ever expected anything less of him.

Makoto startles when Sousuke calls for him over the pops and clangs of dishes, utensils, and oils: “Makoto. Come eat. Five minutes.”

Despite its militant structure, it is an inquiry and not a command. Makoto has no good reason to turn him down, and should be working on proving his kneejerk inclinations wrong, so he rises from the couch, detours to the bathroom to ensure he his visually and olfactorily presentable, and sits at the two-seated table flush with the wall. He found and bought this shortly after he moved in. A unicorn of a piece of furniture that was tall enough to accommodate their heights while still being narrow enough to not block the walkway. Sousuke had given up on finding the right size table and had just been resigned eating at the bar like some sort of bachelor. Whenever Makoto came over for dinner when they were still nervous and pretended their relationship was chaste, they’d have to sit side by side to eat together—

Sousuke sets before him an empty mug and a plate of eggs, bacon, and buttered toast. In the center of the table he sets a carafe of coffee, a few individual packets of sugar, and a creamer. Finally he goes back for his plate and mug, and settles in across from Makoto. There’s an aversion to his gaze he fights to keep suppressed that clues Makoto in that Sousuke is just as uneasy about sitting so close together as Makoto is quickly becoming. But there is resolve in his movements as well that imply he’s committed to some semblance of normalcy between them, reinforced by sharing what is perhaps the most politically neutral meal of all time, barring the vegetarian cardiologist’s perspective. Sousuke communicates his more challenging feelings with food.

Makoto mixes his coffee just so, Sousuke takes his black. It is incumbent upon Makoto to set the tone, now that they are stripped of surprise and social interruption and small talk. But he stalls to thank Sousuke quietly and eat while the food and the peace is still fresh.

“Sleep all right?”

He seems to be asking in earnest, dispelling the lingering fear that Makoto’s dream was not a dream. Good. It was so sudden and disjointed that Makoto is relieved it didn’t happen. The water must’ve been a courtesy byproduct of Sousuke getting his own. “A little fitful. Mostly fine.”

“Hm.”

Makoto doesn’t press on it. There is a lingering hope Sousuke will carry the conversation as he may have in the past as an act of kindness when Makoto was tongue-tied, but it does not come to fruition.

“I’m sorry,” Makoto does finally say. He’s only had a vague idea of what truly drove him to come here, but it’s shaping up to be a prostrated apology tour at this rate. It does not abate his deep longing or regret, nor address his grief, but it is a start. “For yesterday.” He looks up. “Well, and the rest of the yesterdays.”

Sousuke sighs. He’s done that a lot since Makoto got here. It leaves the impression Makoto is wallowing in something Sousuke finds stale. “Makoto.” He sets his mug down. “There is no amount of anguish I have over what happened that can hold a candle to the hell I know you have been dragging yourself through for doing it, all right?”

“But don’t you want to talk about it?”

“Why? I know what happened and so do you. You’re smart. Stupid, but smart.”

“You should be angry.”

“No,” Sousuke tersely corrects, “you _want_ me to be angry.”

Makoto is dead in the water for a response. He doesn’t know what it means, not at first. But perhaps in his inner contradiction lies an explanation. His commitment to allowing Sousuke to feel whatever he wants to feel about him is at odds with his more specific desire to cleanse himself in the fires of Sousuke’s fury so he can finally rid himself of… himself? So he can prove his contrition in a tangible way, so when he says he misses Sousuke so much he can’t breathe sometimes, it has tooth and meaning to Sousuke because Makoto has earned regret in his exile.

Without Sousuke’s anger, there is nothing tying him to Makoto anymore. All this toil, all this suffering in the isolation and unknowing of his own creation, was Makoto’s choice of purgatory, not Sousuke’s. Sousuke moved on, like Makoto told him to with his parting words. Makoto got exactly what he asked for, an honesty Sousuke always promised he would give him.

Sousuke is right. Maybe Makoto never cared about deserving it or fixing it. He only wanted Sousuke to be angry at him to validate his pointless suffering and to prove to someone other than himself that he is a monster for what he did.

Sousuke allows Makoto to sit there and squirm through all shades of alternating confusion and horror, keeping his gaze on his food so Makoto may maintain some dignity. Another mercy among so many. One truism remains, however, no matter how blindsided Makoto is by his own manipulative proclivities.

“I miss you so much.” His stomach sours as soon as he says it, so fundamentally uncomfortable is he with his desires laid out unconditioned and unqualified. He is not allowed to miss Sousuke. His tongue is treasonous. “I do. I wish I could take it back and fix it.”

To a trained eye, Sousuke is not entirely the monolith he strives to be in these situations. Despite accusations by those who don’t know better, it is not his goal to appear aloof or indifferent. Rather he does not like to be read before he has finished writing his own script. But there are often subtle tells, as there are now. Perhaps in the tensed flat of his hands on the table, or how he grinds down his teeth on one side but not the other with the one tucked corner of his mouth giving it away. Knowing how to read him as if he never left only makes Makoto miss him more; their mutual expertise in self-censored subtlety and meticulous observation made their communications unique and and their interpersonal challenges formidable but satisfying to overcome.

But now, witnessing Sousuke’s determination to prevent how afraid he still is of Makoto’s ability to hurt him from moving from his eyes to taking over his face stops Makoto short of expecting a response.

It’s Makoto’s turn to allow Sousuke some privacy. “You don’t need to say anything about it.” He resumes eating. “You’re right. I do wish you were angry and I didn’t realize it until now. But even so, I still miss you.”

Some of Sousuke’s fear breeches his faux placidity and masquerades as a bristled defense. “And you wanted what out of this, ultimately? You thought apologizing would just fix it, like you said?”

Makoto shakes his head, denying it. “I wanted to see you no matter how it turned out. I wanted to know if you hated me enough to turn me away if I showed up unannounced. Then maybe I could finally move on.” He blinks in surprise of his own straightforwardness. “Yeah. It’s selfish but that’s the truth.”

Sousuke’s not even looking at his food anymore. He’s abandoned his push for tepid normalcy. “Just because I’m not angry doesn’t mean I can’t hate you.”

“I know.”

“I can hate you and still give you a place to sleep. I can hate you and not be a dick.”

“I know.”

“So what if I do hate you?”

“Then this is easy.” Makoto shrugs. He feels no fear, only a wicked thrill jumping along his spine that he could get the sort of hate his demon craves. It disgusts him now that he knows he’s been seeking that external destruction out like a drug. He loops his shoulders back and down and forces the thrill away. “I’ll know my place. But you called me and you didn’t have to, you could’ve had Haru do it, even. So I guess for the first time, I asked myself instead… what if you don’t hate me? And my uncertainty of the answer was enough to get me to try something different.”

Sousuke responds with a wry, bitter grin. “I really wish you’d asked yourself that before you left, not now.”

“I regret my choices, Sousuke. I haven’t hidden that from anyone.”

And true it may be that Sousuke is not perpetually angry, it still does not insulate him from experiencing the sort of ephemeral anger that comes as a surprise flash of reactionary heat in an otherwise chilled-appearing pan. “Well that must feel fucking nice, to have had choices in all of this. You finally got your control. Are you fucking happy now?”

Makoto has no appropriate response. It’s an ugly, naked truth that he would not dare to deny or defend himself from. He wants to lay his hands over Sousuke’s newly clenched fists and apologize until his voice is dry, but both actions would simply be covering up that which can’t be mended by touch or apology.

“What can I do?” he asks, hoping it sounds as genuine as he means it to. “Do you want me to go?”

Sousuke leans back, closes his eyes, and exhales long through his nose. He visibly calms and focuses. “I don’t know. Maybe? Not really? But, for now?”

Makoto may struggle with taking straightforward declarations of intent at face value, like any insecure adult worth their salt, but he certainly intimately understands muddled waters of nondirection. It is the feeling of something left unfinished, but knowing that something is stuck to itself for the time being. However this goes, it’s not quite ready to fall off the bone, and there is comfort for him here in Sousuke’s indecision. Indecision is not a no.

“Yeah. Of course.” He pushes back from the table to stand, and stops when Sousuke sighs again and gestures to the food.

“Eat your fucking food first. C’mon.”

“Right. Okay.”

“If you want to.”

“I do.” He does, he’s starving, even if the meal has chilled and the eggs are approaching singularity. That, and Sousuke was never one to hold back on the butter. Nothing so visually basic has any business tasting so decadent.

So they finish in what is somehow not an uncomfortable silence, but the bar for such an interpretation is low given the tension laced through the minutes preceding it. Whatever anger brought out Sousuke’s fangs dissipates in the autumnal morning light streaming through the window to their right. Just as quietly, they finish and part, with Sousuke insisting on tending the kitchen by the way he cuts off Makoto’s unspoken path to the sink, and Makoto re-routing to gather his things for a day out.

While he pockets his topped off phone and skinny wallet, he deliberates just bringing the entire duffel bag with him, just in case his second and final night in Iwatobi is not to be spent here. His wet clothes from yesterday should be dry by now, and he finds them hanging over the shower curtain bar where he set them last.

Sousuke, having always possessed a supernatural sense for the going-ons of his household, or maybe Makoto’s thoughts, speaks from somewhere in the living room: “Leave it. I’ll wash everything before your flight.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Makoto responds, at the same times as he re-enters the living room and leaves the clothes where they were. Then, testing the waters, he tries a jest. “I don’t want to risk a wrinkled, mildewed mess.”

Sousuke straightens from his lean against the back of the couch. “I got better at that.”

So, to not rock the boat of Sousuke’s expectations, Makoto will leave the bag. “Well. Thank you for breakfast.”

“It’s nothing,” Sousuke dimisses. “Had to make it regardless. And, you don’t actually need to leave. But I do have plans.” He pauses and Makoto thinks he is being given a chance to pry, but he won’t, and Sousuke is compelled to explain anyway. “Short straw draw for a career fair presentation at the university.”

The date mentioned yesterday is conspicuously left out, making it a stalemate or more likely, off-limits. Makoto nods ambivalently. “On the drive over last night, I think Haru mentioned grabbing me today once you left. I think. I was in and out.” He did not mention anything of the sort, but Makoto is equally compelled to rid Sousuke of any residual notions of hosting obligation.

“All right.” The abrupt stop of it indicates thoughts left unexpressed. Sousuke visibly smothers whatever else he wanted to say, setting an upper limit on how long their truce can hold.

So Makoto offers a parting smile and walks for the door, and he doesn’t register Sousuke’s frustrated grunt until his forward momentum rubber bands in response to Sousuke’s grip around the thick of his forearm. He looks down and to the side and stares at their juncture, thoughts acid washed to a blank slate. Sousuke still leans on the back of the sofa, but holds Makoto’s arm rock steady, a near vice-grip, for the better half of a solid minute in deadlocked silence. Makoto doesn’t dare break his grasp or say a word about it, in fear Sousuke will come to his senses and re-establish his polite, but firm, host-guest boundary.

“I don’t hate you,” Sousuke finally says, enunciated and clear yet inaudible outside of the immediate space. He casually speaks with such bombast that, in contrast, when he does speak quietly like this, the fractured expectation never fails to shift the ground beneath Makoto’s feet. “You can’t leave thinking that. I don’t know why I said that shit.” His grip tightens and Makoto’s skin is white where it displaces his blood. Sousuke is frustrated and tongue-tied, two states he particularly hates to communicate in, so Makoto does not fault him too much for the strength of his grip. “I’m not mad. I don’t hate you.”

Having identified and rid himself of the thrill of being hated, Makoto is newly ashamed to be so awash in relief. He is ashamed because like Haru before him, no small part of Sousuke fears and wonders if he could’ve done more despite Makoto’s attempts to own the entire thing. He is ashamed because that is a painful state of being that he has caused and is now siphoning relief from. Parasitic, but the reality.

The best he can do is take it and move forward with it. In the past he would’ve weaponized it against himself and left Sousuke confused, entrenched in his fears. He’s not here to repeat the past, though it is alarming how enticing it is to do so. The best action is to carry through with leaving so they can both think, even if Sousuke wishes he could say more.

Makoto turns his torso to face Sousuke better, but it is unnecessary, as Sousuke has been looking down for the duration of the conversation. He thinks about reaching across himself and laying his hand alongside Sousuke’s face, to feel him and soothe him, but before he can consider the ramifications of such intimacies, Sousuke lets him go and exhales a long-held breath.

“Sorry,” he mutters, flexing the strain from his hand and fingers.

“I’ll see you later?” Makoto asks, and does finally fail to stop himself from gently taking Sousuke’s hand in his own and riding the ridges of his knuckles back and forth with his thumb, an inclination he has struggled to contain since the night prior where he dreamed of it. He hopes Sousuke receives it as a mutual human comfort. He does not pull away in disgust, and Makoto’s concern is short-lived. Perhaps another simple thing he has made too complicated.

Sousuke nods and pivots the topic, bringing his hands back to himself as Makoto releases him and looking up. “I should get the call for Poppy today.” He frowns. “Rin is bothering me about a party? That’s a thing?”

“A reception? A wake for the cat?” Makoto corrects, barely catching an unbidden laugh.

Sousuke rolls his eyes. “Yeah. That. Not doing it anyway.”

It is calm once more, like peace between them is the natural order of things no matter the magnitude of the tumult. So Makoto departs without saying goodbye again, and Sousuke watches him go without another word again, and in this way their history is honored by imitation. New to Makoto is the audacious perspective that it ends this way only because it isn’t over yet.

* * *

Time moves unfettered in Iwatobi, liberated from any sense.

Growing up, it never passed. Childhood felt like forever. Then, without warning, tomorrow was yesterday before Makoto could finish today. It slipped through his fingers, flashed at his periphery, and never dared be linear, never allowed itself to be caught and held long enough to be quantified. By the time they struck out on their own after high school, Makoto could comfortably accommodate the child he would forever be and the adult he was still figuring out. Because time in Iwatobi was only a suggestion, he was able to be many versions all at once, none in competition with each other. It was a thing bursting with unrealized potential and electrified with jittery anticipation.

Then an exodus happened, and they all struck out on their own, which wasn’t all bad and was certainly self-affirming, but those beautifully messy timelines untangled. The many points of light dimmed until there were only a few remaining, and it didn’t quite feel right to be forced towards an illusion of choice. So they all came back on their own, some right away (Haru) and others dragging their feet (Rin), but eventually they all came back. And then where that should’ve been the end, as he has rehashed with himself endlessly by now, Makoto’s awe of his own potential mutated into fear, and he went back to where time made more sense.

He should not have been surprised to find not-Iwatobi just as unfulfilling and ultimately pointless a second time, and perhaps he wasn’t surprised, and he consciously chose to go back based on what he understood he deserved. Being an undeserving coward and all.

All that is to say, a day back in Iwatobi has lasted no less than a decade and has contained all of the energy expended in the year leading up to it. Makoto is exhausted, an ardent believer in the idea that no one can exhaust him better than himself. And this sure has been a lot of... him.

He strikes out on his own from Sousuke’s and walks the town for as long as he can stand to ruminate on himself, on Sousuke, on Poppy, on life and death, on the enraging injustice that laundry is at minimum a three-part chore, and by post-lunch he has had enough of it just as Haru is wondering where he is. Belatedly, does Haru have a steady, normal job? That Makoto is not sure (and truly never has been since college if he’s being honest) is more of an answer than any truth he may glean by asking.

Makoto has made no goal of his walk, and followed wherever his subconscious nudged him to go. One summer night three years ago, he was walking home from someone’s going away party (Gou? Maybe? Sure the four of them left and came back but everyone else left and didn’t and for a while there were a lot of those one-way parties), and wandered a wobbly zig-zag through the streets in the elusive way a dropped piece of scrap paper with important information on it catches a gust of wind and flutters across the pavement.

The unconventional route cut through a small public garden, where an old angry cat tried to attack him for his trespassing and then, having either a change of heart or a sudden and profound sense of pity, picked him up like the tipsy stray he was and made sure he got home all right. Then she must have thought, hey, this guy is actually feeding me for free even though I tried to eviscerate him, that’s neat. Then she thought the next day, hey this other guy is also feeding me for free even though I used his very very very close pal as a scratch post, also neat. What idiots.

And so she stayed even if she was never charmed by the first guy’s attempts to woo her towards a ceasefire. By all expended efforts to prove otherwise, she was a career outdoor stray thanks to being tragically hideous (conventionally so, Makoto found her quite cute, something else Poppy despised about him) and thus incapable of charming her way into a home sooner, but she never left their home once she finally got inside. She knew a good thing when it landed in front of her. Makoto could’ve learned from that.

So it is not surprising or remarkable that he re-visits the garden, now overgrown and untended and surrendered to nature. It is neglected or it is thriving, depending on how he looks at it. Perhaps he thought returning here would drum up some stronger feelings for the loss of his cat, but he feels just as detached from the event as he did when he learned of it. He misses her, in the abstract. He also already said goodbye a while ago, when it made more sense to leave her with the people she loved and not take her and force her to live alone with someone she hated. It settles uncomfortably in his psyche and makes him doubt parts of himself he thought he understood better. He has always been acutely sensitive to death. But this death is far away.

Anyway. His phone is ringing. Haru is here to collect him now.

* * *

Haru has the space for band practice, to the detriment of the retirees who have overtaken the neighborhood. His little last hurrah of youthful defiance, he calls it as Makoto cringes away from the high-frequency screech of Rin’s instrument cable meeting the amp’s input jack.

“It’s an acoustic set, Rin, please calm down,” Haru chastises.

“It’s an amp I bought off a twelve year old, Haru,” Rin retorts. “Not working with the best here.”

Haru appears amused, ever quick to leap at any opportunity to disgruntle Rin over nonsense. He looks down at his keyboard and pecks out a simple repeating melody as he moves to the next topic. “So what are we playing?”

Rin shrugs a shoulder, open strums, stops on the A line, and tunes its key a partial turn before responding. “Some lovey dovey shit. Whatever those drunk university kids like.”

“You don’t have a set list? It’s just irresponsible.”

“When have you ever cared if we had a plan?!” Rin snaps. “Whenever I tell you what we’re playing, you start playing something else anyway! And, furtherm–” Rin snaps his mouth shut, belatedly catching on to Haru’s teasing when Haru fails to keep the smirk off his face. He rolls his eyes, and looks to Makoto. “Anyway. What are we playing, Makoto?”

Makoto holds up a thought-halting palm. “Don’t ask me, I objectively have the worst taste in art.”

Rin considers this while he works in an accompaniment to Haru’s repeating melody. The result strikes Makoto as familiar, likely some older American rock song going by the simple chord progression and synthetic spacey keyboard buzz. “You know what? I won’t argue with that.”

Haru stops playing. “Can we get that in writing?”

Rin drops his guitar to hang from his neck on its strap and throws his head back, exasperated. “Shut _up_ you are always harassing me!”

“Rin, focus. What are we going to play?”

“No!” Rin barks with a toddler’s bratty tone. “No way. Not gonna keep falling for your shit. We will play whatever I start with, and you’ll just have to catch up or stand there looking stupid and either outcome is fine for me.”

He picks up on the chord progression he left off on from there, denying Haru retaliation. Haru looks quite pleased with himself as it is, so he doesn’t push it and also resumes his melody. Makoto has slowly fused with the decor, he feels, in a manner that used to be welcoming and familiar (Makoto is always there and his presence is warm) but is now causing him some level of duress (Makoto is never here and we got used to it and have forgotten about him now). These are the need-versus-want thought spirals that sent him running in the first place.

The music carries for a minute in a loop, and abruptly stops. “Journey!” Rin shouts, a student with an a-ha! moment.

“Is it?” Haru wonders, and furrows his brow, which bounces high in the next moment in matched revelation. “Oh. It is.”

“A what?” Makoto wonders.

“Journey— the song here.” Rin clears his throat and sings, in English: “ _Somwmewo, love widljlw fmlwk you!”_

(approximate sound transposition)

Haru answers with more lyrics in English that structurally make sense, and sound real word-adjacent, but fall short of Makoto’s middle school English comprehension when dressed up in song. _Miss you love? Missile dove? Misuse of?_ Likely the first— songs in English are always about yearning love, and less frequently about avian warheads or improper handling.

Anyway. He believes he has heard this specific song before after all, putting to rest the fear he knows nothing about American rock-metal anthems from the eighties. What a relief.

“I see.”

Rin tilts his head, assessing Makoto’s presence within the context of this development. Makoto is not privy to the new set of rules he is being set against, but he is uncomfortable with the newfound attention he was pining for just a moment prior. If the song is about missing someone, he figures Sousuke has walked onto Rin’s list of acceptable topics. “You guys talk?”

Haru doesn’t rebuke Rin or rescue Makoto or offer silent solidarity this time. That’s all right. Makoto is better prepared today. “We did.”

“And?”

“Nothing. We just talked.”

Rin rolls his eyes. “You guys are so boring.”

Makoto frowns. “What did you expect?”

“For one of you to cut the bullshit? We’re all dicks to each other at some point. You, a bigger dick than most, but really it’s no different from the shit I’ve pulled like, multiple times. I’m still here, you guys let me come home. So lay your truths out there and see if it lines up and when it does— because it will— all this drama shit will look so… so...” Rin pauses and rolls his hand in search of the best word, invoking the image of a twentieth century Italian mobster playing a game of dice.

“Dumb,” Haru finishes for him. “It will look dumb.”

“It’s not that simple,” Makoto argues.

“Of course it is!” Rin laughs. “Tell me one good reason why it isn’t. He loves you and misses you, dumbass. Apologize and tell him you do too. Done. You move on together and you’re both wiser and you both know it’s worth it because you still want it. It’s a good thing and it’s not complicated. I forced it all out in the open yesterday for a reason, believe it or not. Saved you like, what, three weeks of coded texting?”

Makoto shakes his head and takes stock of his pulse. Steady. Not even flushed with exasperation being the subject of Rin’s intimate word choices. Already re-desensitized to Rin’s naked and abundantly confrontational disposition? Maybe. “He might not want ‘together’ even if what you said is true.”

“He does,” Haru interrupts impatiently. “We would know. We’ve been here to help him through it, when he lets us.”

Rin balks, sudden shock receding into a full-hearted wonderment. “Haru! You agreed with me.”

He shrugs. “Because it’s true _and_ I’m also sick of the moping for what I have always considered to be a temporary situation.”

Usually, Haru speaking of Makoto’s fate as if it’s a foregone conclusion bothers Makoto. It implies Makoto is predictable, and tediously so, stretching the limits of Haru’s patience if Makoto dares to doubt, hope, or reflect because _obviously_ he will be all right, _obviously,_ and all of this hem-hawing is adorable but futile because Makoto will never break the mold Haru has foreseen for him _._ Ok, scratch that, it’s still bothersome, but temporarily comforting for now.

“I thought you said he’s dating again,” Makoto argues somewhat weakly, already knowing the answer to come but famished for some affirmation.

“Oh, _puh-lease_ ,” Rin says. “Yeah, he goes and tries to fake it until he makes it, but there’s always something unforgivably wrong with them, y’know?” Rin lays his palms over his cheeks and speaks through his nose, an apparent imitation of Sousuke if Sousuke were not anything like Sousuke: “Oh, Rin, they put their feet on everything! Rin, they made me a full tray of cinnamon buns! Rin, they’re in private debt collection, a salaried enemy of the working class!”

“A flavor of things we’ve heard,” Haru adds.

“...But he’s in law enforcement,” Makoto cannot stop himself from addressing aloud.

“Baby steps. He hasn’t made that connection yet, I’m working on it. You can’t just lead with Marx and anarcho theory, Makoto, these things take patience.”

Truly, any other time, Haru’s boredom-bred subtle radicalization of stoicism-sympathetic Sousuke would be a more entertaining topic.

Rin remains remarkably focused, for him. This lends genuity to Rin’s ranting. “He’s stalling on that whole moving on thing because he also believes you’ll come back, even if he won’t just fucking say that,” he finishes with an exasperated edge. “Deliver me from this nightmare, Makoto, for my own sake. Just come back. I am selfish enough to ask that you do it for me.”

In his mind then, Makoto speeds up time, because he is in Iwatobi and as he has already mused, one can do that here. He thinks about tomorrow evening, when he touches down in Tokyo and walks for thirty minutes just to find a cab outside of the surge pricing area of the airport. He will miss being home, he will think about his own bed, and when he opens the door to his dark apartment, he will be shattered to remember those feelings of longing will not abate because they never went away in the first place.

He will decide not to think about work until he is being paid to do so again, but check his work email on the train in anyway, agonizing over everything he somehow could’ve missed in fewer than three days. He will have missed nothing, because he is replaceable and not important enough to be copied on time-sensitive correspondence. There will be a building-wide Friday afternoon flier for the upcoming business casual Saturday, and that’s it.

And because if nothing else, his isolation in Tokyo has given him the gift of being truly acquainted with himself for the first time, he also knows he will fall over an invisible cliff by lunch break on his first day back to this empty life. He will not want to think about it, so he will distract himself by trying to be someone he is not. He will recommit to his work, take up life-affirming habits like journaling and intention setting and telling himself out loud that he is part of a bigger picture and not just a redundancy, all things that place him in the moment. Inevitably, because being in the moment is more unbearable than dreaming about what he’s thrown away, he will have a meltdown and, in a bid to escape a level deeper, go out to dark places and meet people through smoky, neon hazes and introduce himself as anyone other than Makoto Tachibana, often not giving a name at all.

His broken heart’s melodrama is a thing made of an early afternoon soap opera. It is acute yet predictable. It is also generous enough to be cyclical like this. Makoto’s more optimistic self presents the same familiar opportunities to divert from the same downward spiral that leads to the same bottom. He, so far, has chosen to do the same thing every time the cycle starts again, and still has the gall to wonder how he ends up so unbelievably miserable. Like it’s a mystery.

Is it dumb to think Poppy knew what Makoto was doing, knew what Sousuke was suffering through, and planned to use her inevitable death as a last ditch effort to give them each an out of their respective purgatories? Animals have weird control over their deaths, right?

Okay. Unequivocally, it is dumb to think that.

But as Poppy sensed when she followed him home, some opportunities are better than others. And because she refuses to be anything other than the center of attention even in death, Makoto takes the phonecall he receives just then, as time undilates to the present again and Rin is still waiting patiently for Makoto to respond to his pleas, as one of those elevated opportunities.

* * *

In Makoto’s hands: a latched wooden box. Ten centimeters by seven centimeters by six and one half centimeters, approximately. The wood is dark and lacquered. A decorative pearl inlay frames the top. In the center, there are two inlaid pearl paw prints. It is very small, compared to the size of Poppy, who, when comprised of living organic matter, required both arms and nerves of steel to handle.

There are many responses, including no response at all, that would have been more appropriate upon receiving the urn of cat ashes from the vet’s front office assistant than the response Makoto gave.

It went like this.

The assistant plucked the box, tagged with an askance sticky note (“popey”), from a shelf within a cabinet that perhaps should have been out of sight of the public but wasn’t. His box was the smallest and least ornate receptacle on the shelf, eliciting within Makoto an absurd spike of insecurity and inferiority and, astonishing enough, irritation. Was Sousuke too cheap to get her something nicer? Is everyone else just batshit insane, spending that sort of money on hand-painted ceramics, affixed portraits, and-or poetry-engraved glass plaques stood upright in front of heart-shaped urns mounted on marble slabs dedicated to their late Chiyo-chans, Momos, Hanas, and Kurumis?

Blessedly, the cremation and urn were pre-paid. But the assistant still included the receipt with his box, which utilizes a default template for purchased items within the office and thus makes it a point to emphasize no returns or exchanges will be accepted. Upon seeing what Sousuke paid for this, he rescinded his accusation that Sousuke was cheap about it. Upheld was the idea that everyone else is batshit insane.

It is with this context that Makoto took Poppy from the man, looked down at her, looked up at him, and said, incredulously: “Is this even the whole cat or did he just pay for part of her?”

“...It’s a mix,” the man replied on delay.

“Excuse me?”

“A mix.”

“Of _what_?”

“Well…” he trailed unsure, and then reached for the receipt hanging loose from between Makoto’s index and middle fingers. With it right-side up to review, he nodded. “Right. You paid for a… well. A group cremation. You get a portion back. It’s a mix. We recommend it for smaller animals, for cost efficiency’s sake… did no one explain this to you when you brought the animal in?”

“I didn’t pay for this,” Makoto dismissed alongside the visual that the term _group cremation_ summoned. “You called me to come get _her_ , not part of her as well as parts of a hamster and a… a... ”

“Parakeet, I believe.” He returned the receipt to Makoto. “A few other rodents.”

“Parakeet.”

“Right. Well. Sorry for the mix up, Mr. Tachibana. I see it was paid for by a Yamazaki, but your name is still the main contact on the animal’s account, so we called you when it was ready.”

“Poppy!” he snapped, then frowned, as the absurdity of it all hit him like a slap across the face. “Sorry. Thank you for your assistance.”

He then shuffled out of the office and back into Haru’s waiting car (to Makoto’s vindication, Haru balked: “that’s it? but she was so fat.”). Since then, Makoto has been inexplicably unable to part with Poppy, declining any and all opportunity to drop her off with his things at Sousuke’s, or leave her at Haru’s, or leave her in Haru’s car later that evening when they made their way over to the Overtime for the last minute set.

Thus, to recenter the present, in his hands: a latched wooden box.

Rin and Haru retain enough grace not to question why Makoto will not part with his box of chimeric ashes. Quickly after arriving, Rin and Haru part ways to talk to the venue manager and work out the details of their gear and performance. Makoto locates a high top table at the back of the venue to take root at and plans to remain there until the set is up.

Makoto observes as the manager, Rin, and Haru get onto the same page after a brief conversation, presumably. She leaves them to tend to other affairs, and Haru and Rin turn towards each other and continue talking. Casually, easily, undefended. They’ve always been a fixture in each other’s lives, often stubbornly and competitively, and only more recently at a mutual peace. Now, though, they’re enjoying each other’s company in a way that is new to Makoto’s eyes. They are closer than they used to be. They are sharing more than just jabs and taunts. What begins as a passive observation of his friends at a distance becomes a scene that Makoto steps into. It is his, too. He helped make this.

He has been focused on the damage his absence may have caused his friends. But it is possible that this focus is too narrow. He also thinks of the heretofore unseen depth to Sousuke and Haru’s interactions with one another, evidenced by the off-handed comments given to Makoto by them both indicating they too have bonded in new ways. Makoto wasn’t around to buffer everyone’s edges and play peacemaker. So sure there was grief and confusion, as he has felt and will always manage the guilt for. But there was growth, too.

And again, Makoto is struck with the one thing he hasn’t allowed himself to feel without regret, considering himself undeserving of the extent of it given his fault in creating it. Makoto misses them. But this time he does not feel sick to lean into it and own it as his own selfish desire. Instead this time, with Poppy between his hands reminding him that missing someone is a temporary condition until it isn’t, he is emboldened by it and sees more clearly the hellish cycle he has been a victim to when he refuses to see things simply as they truly are and as they appear before him. Sousuke, Haru, and Rin are plainly before him now, and they say they still want him, and he misses them, and that’s all there needs to be to that.

He doesn’t want to learn about Sousuke’s incredible accomplishments, Rin’s evolving passions, Haru’s ever impossibly open heart, in summary and after the fact. He wants to be there experiencing this life with them, however they will have him in it. He is not their crutch anymore, and they are not his. It was unbearable for Makoto to know this, once. It fractured his reality and he did not handle that break with care and patience. But now that the center of him is no longer a churning, lurching sea of distress and the unknowable, that broken, uneven fault line within him is not held up tight by the pressure he no longer unwittingly applies to it. It simply gives. It falls into place, slowly lowers until it settles, and it is quiet.

He wants to come home.

Makoto pulls a shaky breath and looks down at his box. Even if Sousuke does not want to be with him how Makoto desires, he is going to come home. The conviction behind his thoughts rattles him. It is as sure and clear as he has felt in recent memory, about anything. It was that simple.

(but he really hopes Sousuke wants to be with him again.)

An hour passes wherein Makoto detaches from all of this to rest and watches the venue slowly fill up with young adults who look to Rin and Haru setting up, cock their heads as if trying to square them with the musicians who were originally supposed to play, then shrug and accept the substitution on their way to the bar. It’s a small town and beggars can’t be choosers for entertainment. Despite seating growing scarce, no one tries to sit with him at his high top or steal the extra stool. He must look just adult enough to be both invisible and unapproachable. No fun for a conversation, and a stickler for his delineated space.

He only comes back to himself because Haru and Rin are ready to play, and the energy shifts towards them and their introducing each other. From there, they waste no time beginning their set, and Makoto is not surprised to hear their instruments harmonize and weave together seamlessly from the outset. He is surprised to hear they can sing, somewhat. Well enough for the mellow, acoustic tone they’re aiming for.

A few minutes is about the only attention he can give them at present, however, because Sousuke takes the stool opposite of him and slides Makoto a drink across the tabletop in one fluid, infuriatingly smooth gesture. Whatever it is, it’s in a highball glass and it’s pink. Alcohol is not going to help him with any of this, but it would be worse to reject the gesture, right?

“Relax. It’s grapefruit,” Sousuke assures him quickly over the din of the venue. “And mine’s just Coke. You’re too spacey when you’re drunk and I’m too cagey and I think there’s enough going on without that.”

Makoto sighs, relieved. “Oh, good.” Subconsciously, he has hidden the wooden box behind his forearm, pulled close to the edge of the table. All this zoning out and he forgot to practice what he was going to say. He has decided not to lead with the cat, apparently. “Sousuke, I—”

“Shh, shh, shh,” Sousuke shushes, eyes slipping shut and revealing a headache. “Let me sit here a minute before we get into it again. That’s what the drink is for.”

“Right. Thank you.” It’s bitter and sour and sweet; quite nice. His ears perk towards Rin and Haru, who are deep into their second song, a slower, more heartfelt track than their upbeat opener. Haru leads this one in beautifully tended and rehearsed piano alongside English lyrics that Makoto wouldn’t need to know to glean the jist of from Haru’s energy alone, but he does note the use of _songbird_ and _I love you I love you I love you_ distinctly. Maybe Makoto was too quick to dismiss avian warheads earlier and Americans really do sing about birds more than he originally thought (which was never).

Before long, Makoto physically suppresses his urge to nervously fidget by sitting ramrod straight and pretending he is balancing a full plate on his head. By contrast, Sousuke slumps on his stool, which would already be too small for him were he sitting upright, making him now look like an elephant balancing precariously on one stilt by the way he’s flattened and spread out.

Sensing the air has gone stale, Sousuke sits up braced by one elbow and pinches the inside corners of his eyes as he exhales the day’s suffering. He’s three quarters turned toward Makoto, open enough to have a conversation without totally tuning out his friends’ show.

“They’re good,” he remarks.

“I thought you had plans?”

“Yeah, well, y’know,” he mutters non-committant. “I don’t like to miss coming out to see them if I can help it. And I could help it. So I did.” His nose scrunches in mild repulsion of himself. “What I mean is do you know what sort of debt I’d owe if I didn’t? God they’d never let me forget it.”

It’s cute how Sousuke still feels the need to act like that manly part at the end is necessary whenever he gets close to admitting he might possibly die without Rin, like they're a set of a mildly dysfunctional, bonded pair of chinchillas. “I see.”

“It also helps not being the only old guy in the room for once, so I didn’t mind swinging by.”

“Is that what we are?”

Sousuke shrugs one shoulder. “According to all of these twenty year olds I gotta deal with fucking constantly.”

“Speaking of, how did your presentation go?”

This earns Makoto a profoundly human, weathered glance that cuts to his heart. It’s the little ticks and vulnerabilities Sousuke only shares when he’s comfortable that Makoto’s all but forgotten about that make him happiest to be trusted with again. “Have you ever tried to talk to college kids about a career in desk investigations on a Saturday afternoon and managed to eek out any sort of enthusiasm for it? Knowing the whole event was mandatory _and_ you were last to go?”

He smiles apologetically. “I can’t say any of us would’ve been moved by the same presentation at that age either.”

Sousuke mulls this over, jutting his chin forward in a near pout. “Yeah. Shit. Good point.”

Makoto drums the fingers of his free hand up and down along the length of his empty glass. Sousuke takes that in as well, looking from his half-finished drink to Makoto’s obvious signs of anxiousness. He gets serious then, shifting seamlessly from the languid humdrum of his day to the defensive, rigid posturing Makoto is familiar with from earlier.

“My flight,” Makoto starts, and immediately kicks himself internally for doing so. “Uh. Tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah. I’ll give you a ride, if that’s what you mean.”

“No. Well, yes, I would appreciate it, but also no, that’s not what I meant.”

“Well?” He’s gruff. Protecting himself.

“It’s just. I don’t have a lot of time and I haven’t figured out how to say what I want to say the right way. I’m sorry.” Why is this so difficult when he is so resolved to carry through? Words are hard. “Sousuke, I’m sorry.” And apparently he now only knows three of them.

“God you suck at this.” Sousuke grabs his drink, agitated, and downs the rest of it so quickly the ice jumps in the glass as he slams it down. “Come on. Come here.”

“What?”

“I’m not doing this here around all these people. ‘What? Oh, didn’t hear you. Repeat that? Speak up.’ No. Let’s go. You don’t got time? Great. Don’t waste it.”

“I. Okay.” Makoto was beginning to appreciate the public setting, as it’s not like anyone would hear them and the sensory overload would obscure any waver in his voice or reddened cheek. But of course, Sousuke wants it all laid bare. He holds his box down and behind his thigh on his way out, still committed to keeping it hidden.

Sousuke leads them out through the side door, rounds the building, and continues onto a walking path that runs behind the row of businesses facing the street. More of an alleyway, but a walking path has a better ring to it. He clearly has no idea where he’s going or what’s back here, but also lead with such conviction it would look dumb to stop and turn around and stomp off towards a more suitable place now. At least there’s a streetlight. A harsh, cruel streetlight, determined to bask all of Makoto’s flaws in one focused beam of dazzling light, but light nonetheless.

Once settled, Sousuke crosses his arms and waits.

“I miss you,” Makoto tries. Nope. “I miss everyone.” That wasn’t better. “I’m s—”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore like this,” Sousuke says curtly. “I’m so tired of reliving this shit over and over. I know you’re sorry. I know you regret it. I know you miss me and miss them and feel shitty about it. I know. I told you before we both know what happened and I don’t want to keep talking about it like this.”

“Then what do you want me to say?”

This clearly is not the right thing to say either, as Sousuke’s temper flares. “Since you keep pressing it, that reminds me. When, since all of this went to shit, has it mattered what I wanted?”

“It does matter, I’m listening. Well I was always listening but I can hear you now.”

“That right?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. It never mattered because I never wanted you to leave, Makoto! I never wanted you to go somewhere I couldn’t reach you, literally and figuratively. I never wanted this visit, this conversation, this fucking situation in the first place! But you insisted. You pulled when I pushed and you pushed when I pulled and you dug in your heels and…and... fuck!” He throws his hands up. “I couldn’t keep fighting it if leaving me was what you were bound and determined to do but also fuck if it didn’t make me feel like I failed, like I just couldn’t handle you and trying to get you to stay and work with me was only making it worse.” Sousuke pauses to sigh and scratch at the back of his head, steadfastly opposed to sustained bouts of anger and already burning out. “So I let you have what you wanted. It was what you wanted. I didn’t want it.”

Makoto quickly determines this outburst he thought he deserved from Sousuke does not grant him his twisted catharsis. It is simply horrible, and the depth of Sousuke suffering is worse than he could’ve anticipated hearing the raw, unfiltered anguish and frustration of it from the source. “I don’t want that anymore. I didn’t want it then either. Not really. I just thought I did.”

“I know that too,” Sousuke replies, melancholic. “But how was I going to convince you of what I thought you might want otherwise when you wouldn’t even look at me? Wouldn’t talk to me?”

“You couldn’t.” Makoto sighs. “I was too obsessed with how, I don’t know, unworthy I had become. I wanted to go before you realized it too.”

Makoto can see this mindset wounds Sousuke, another blow to a bruised heart, a man he only wishes to make happy crumbling at the edges and crestfallen before him. Sousuke put everything into making Makoto feel worthy. No wonder he feels like he failed. If anything made Makoto unworthy of Sousuke, it was the way he took and took from Sousuke, voracious for his attention and equally as motivated to corrupt it and reject it once he got it.

“I thought it was the end of me as I knew it when you guys didn’t need me anymore. You know, because we were happy?” He huffs a stunted, incredulous sort of chuff because it will always sound silly out loud. “What good am I if I’m not helping anyone through a crisis, I thought. Just me, and I’m not remarkable... if I ever was by comparison I’m certainly not now. But even so, I don’t like who I’ve become without you guys. I thought it couldn’t get worse if I could separate myself and become something worthy on my own but instead I. I don’t know, I un-became. It got worse.”

He pauses to breathe, and continues when Sousuke doesn’t look like he will interrupt this time. “I’m alone in Tokyo. _Now_ I’m unhappy. Strangers always stay strange. I have no one to share anything at all with. Genuinely no one and nothing and I have tried, I have tried so hard to make it work but no one is you, there is not here. It is so empty and pointless out there, for me. I didn’t want to believe it but eventually I had to reckon with what you and Rin and Haru were always trying to tell me. You all value me, for whatever reasons, and I don’t need to always agree with those reasons, I just need to let you feel what you feel about me. You all made me want to be a stronger person; in a good way, I think I want to live up to those expectations instead of beating myself up for not being there yet. But to do that I needed to learn how to trust it on its own merit without investigating why and looking for the reasons why it shouldn’t be so. I guess I needed to believe you still wanted me, only because it was me, after you didn’t need me anymore.”

Sousuke doesn’t respond at first. Makoto interprets it as a good sign, that he has finally said something worth thinking about and not dismissing as shallow and grovelling outright. Finally, carefully, he asks: “Did you learn it?”

“I think so. Or I’m getting there,” Makoto answers. “I was ready to hear it when you called. I needed to feel, just one more time, how alive the world is when I have all of you. I jumped at the chance. Here I am.”

Sousuke restacks himself upright, folds his arms back and high across his chest, and looks away. He’s borderline petulant and visibly reluctant to lower his guard, though he appears to want to. What Makoto has said has induced a shift between them. Makoto better get this next part right, or he might not get another chance as fluid and forgiving.

“And? So what?”

“I want to come home.” There it is. Was that so hard? Yes. “I don’t want to miss anything else.” He holds up his box and tilts it forward. Their Poppy. “She’s trying to warn me, I think? Is that crazy?”

Sousuke all but gasps in surprise, balking as he realizes what Makoto is holding before caving forward around his arms, back rounded, chin tucked, and laughing down into his center. It’s a beautiful laugh, in the cheesiest way, and Makoto has not felt this accomplished or proud of his efforts in months. Years maybe. Sufficiently derailed and caught in the act of it, Sousuke groans and softens. “It’s a little bit fucking crazy, yes.”

“My name is still on the file.” He holds it out, and Sousuke takes it, looking it over in a similarly underwhelmed and disappointed fashion as Makoto did earlier. So small, so anticlimactic an end for a creature larger than life.

“I was wondering why they didn’t call today.”

“You spent too much. The ghost of our cheese dust huffing queen would be appalled if she could conceptualize money and human death customs.”

“I believe the next tier down was a sandwich bag with her name written on it in Sharpie.”

Makoto snorts and laughs over a jolt of surprise. He hides it behind his hand and speaks through his fingers. “ _Sousuke_ , that’s terrible.”

“The useless fold over kind, not even the zip.”

 _“Stop!”_ he breathes between another fit of laughter.

“Can you imagine?” Sousuke smirks and hands the box back to Makoto once he gets his laugh under control.

Makoto gets out the last of his laughing fit in stuttered hiccups and dabs the corners of both eyes while pushing his glasses up and out of the way with the heel of his free palm. A chance to openly laugh after all of this is more nourishing and restorative than the tens of hours of sleep he owes himself since Sousuke called in the first place. When he looks up, and his vision clears, it is in immediate danger of re-clouding. Sousuke’s expression is one of boundless fondness and adoration, and it’s trained with precision on Makoto in a manner that leaves no room for misinterpretation. Even for Makoto, now locally famous for purposefully misinterpreting everything.

“Anyway,” he says quietly, fearful for the integrity of his voice if he attempts to speak from his ever tightening chest, “that’s what I want. And I’m going to do it. Come home, that is. And whatever you want, with regards to that, I’ll respect. So you know, I hope I can be with you. But I understand if that’s not an option now. Or ever. I do, truly. I’m grateful for—”

“Ehbebep,” Sousuke cuts in both verbally and with a literal karate chop to the space between them. “Makoto, I appreciate how hard it is for you to be sentimental—”

“Oh, then, it’s fine.” That’s a clear thanks but no thanks. “I understand—”

“No, you don’t—”

“You don’t have to—”

“Yes, I really do—”

“We’re adults—”

“You’re not letting me—”

“Because you don’t owe me—

“Makoto!” Sousuke bursts forward two steps, reaches out for him, and stops abruptly with both hands hovering just above Makoto’s shoulders. He instead makes two fists that he returns to himself and drops back to his sides. “Just. Please turn your brain off for five seconds. You said you would hear me out.”

“Okay.” He does not do this, for it is impossible, but he can stop interrupting and listen like he promised. For a moment. Maybe five seconds, as requested.

Sousuke clears his throat and nods and Makoto sees him as a batter stepping up to the plate for his turn after Makoto exhausted his swings. “I said I wanted you to talk to me. So you stopped talking to me. I said I wanted you to look at me. So you stopped looking at me. I said I wanted you to keep trusting me. So you stopped trusting me. I said I wanted you to be with me, Makoto, and you just left. I have been afraid for a long time to tell you what I want.”

Makoto only nods. His ceaseless internal monologuing has gone still, proving the impossible is possible when there’s enough on the line.

“So if I were stupid enough to push through that fear, and say I want you to come home, and that I want you and that has never changed, are you going to leave?”

“No.” He barely says it. He takes a deep breath and tries again. “No, Sousuke.”

Sousuke glances away and swallows down what fear might have made him say were he not careful to catch it. He locks eyes with Makoto when he gets a handle on it. “Then can you please come home? Because I miss you so fucking much, all the time, and this fucking sucks.”

“It really fucking does,” Makoto doesn’t say, oh no, not him, god forbid. “I’m coming home.”

The tension breaks. Sousuke laughs; it’s nervous, yet liberated. “Okay. Yeah. That’s. That’s good.”

“But…” Makoto looks around. Sorted bags of trash. A stack of soggy, empty booze boxes. Pernicious weeds weaving up the fence line and across the walkway. What may be an eavesdropping roach. “If Haru and Rin can take a raincheck, I think there’s a better place to continue this.”

Sousuke’s nod is emphatic and gracious. “Please literally anywhere else.”

* * *

There’s a bench in the overgrown public garden. Makoto remembers it’s there because he ran into it the first time. Before an angry old cat tried to attack him for trespassing.

“This isn’t legal.”

“Then you better not witness me doing it.” Nerves newly collected, Makoto rises off the bench with Poppy, now unlatched. Never one to be out-nerved, Sousuke rises to stand with him despite refusing to moments prior. “Here it goes… I hope her urn mates don’t mind.”

“No last respects?”

Makoto smiles to himself. His heart swells, marbled with both heavy sadness and aerated elation. Everything tastes bittersweet and unfinished even as it appears ripe and ready. All things contradictory can be true at the same time when it comes to death. “Just a thank you, I think. For being there for you when I couldn’t, and calling me back home when it was time.”

Sensing he has said all there is to say about it for them both, he empties the box over the thickest outgrowth, at the edge of the only available light, where the perennials defy the seasons and bloom as they please. After a pause as a symbol of departure, he places the box onto the bench, careful but swift, hands yearning to be free of it.

And he wonders what would be right to do next. What is too much, what isn’t enough. But he is not left to languish, Sousuke chooses for them. He gathers Makoto into his arms, just as Makoto turns to face him, and holds Makoto closer and tighter than anyone else in the world being held that way at that point in time, Makoto figures, until Makoto returns his embrace and passes on the title. When Sousuke parts to create space, he fills it just as quickly as he made it with one reverent, intentional kiss.

It does not go on for as long as it should, for from the dark interrupts one hungry, curious meow.


End file.
